1. In the “Takes a Licking” Department: Katelin left her cell phone in the pockets of her jeans Saturday, a fact we discovered when fishing a load of clothes out of the washer. The cell phone appeared to be completely dead after going through the heavy duty cycle . . . but as it dried out, functionality returned one piece at a time. Today, as best we can ascertain, the phone receives and makes calls as well as it ever did, her contacts are intact, and you can see everything you need to see on the screen, even with little water marks inside it. Astounding!

2. In the “Performs as Advertises” Department: We’ve noticed a higher than usual Japanese Beetle population in our gardens, and noticed a couple of trees were looking a little chewed up, so I went and bought three Bag-A-Bug Japanese Beetle traps. As I was setting them up, I opened the little attractant scent packages, and the bugs started swarming me. I got three traps set up, then fled inside, shaking beetles out of my hair. About four hours later, I went out to look at the traps, and each one had literally hundreds of beetles inside it. Very impressive! (Reminded me of when I was a kid, and we had a Japanese Beetle invasion one year, so they had us all making traps out of chlorine bottles in art class at school to take home and hang in our yards . . . these traps, with these modern attractants, blow our arts and crafts traps completely out of the water, and how).